"So the normalization was manifested there in such a way that when we took the exams and they told us how we did, the current director at the time, Professor Venhoda, told us. And when we came after the holidays, there was a new director. This was a very normalized director who had a very bad influence on our, shall we say, views. And there we understood that the situation was much more serious than we could have imagined in our naivety of that carefree youth."
"Then in January of '69 Jan Palach committed suicide by burning himself to death, so of course I recorded that the very day it happened, and maybe the next day after that we went with the school to ski training, and then we found out a few days later that Jan Palach had died. The teacher who was running the course had us go into this big canteen and there he announced the fact and then we stood up and observed a minute's silence in his memory."
"My grandfather was involved in this resistance. From Mělník he took messages to the representatives of this secret society and from them he collected information, which he then spread among the citizens of Mělník. This was quite important for the citizens to prepare themselves for the fall of Austria and to get used to the fact that an independent Czech state could be established. At that time it was not yet considered that it would be a state of Czechs and Slovaks, later Czechoslovakia. So my grandfather lived through the war by participating in the domestic resistance through the Maffie. One of his important activities was that he drove an aprovision to Professor Masaryk's wife, who was left destitute in Prague."
Jan Petrželka was born on 17 February 1955 and grew up in Mělník. His grandfather Václav Petrželka established cooperation with the Maffia during the First World War, which passed information between the domestic and foreign resistance, and thanks to this he was in contact with President T. G. Masaryk after the war. Jan Petrželka‘s uncle Miloš fought in World War II and took part in the Normandy landings. Jan Petrželka graduated from the gymnasium in Mělník and later from the University of Economics in Prague. After his studies he worked as an accountant at ČSAD and after the Velvet Revolution he was the director of the General Health Insurance Company in Mělník for eighteen years. In 2023 he lived in Mělník.
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